Thursday, December 17, 2015

Hooray for the Snitches of Breaking the Silence

Image from article, with caption: Breaking the Silence employees at the organization's Tel Aviv office, December 16, 2015.

The Israeli soldiers who expose the crimes of the occupation are much braver than the cowards who shoot to death Palestinian girls wielding scissors.

Excerpt:

Hooray for those who won’t keep silent in the face of those crimes, hooray to Breaking the Silence.

The wave of savage incitement against the NGO, Breaking the Silence, consists of two contentions — that they’re liars and that they’re snitches. The first is false, the second is absurd. Nobody has caught Breaking the Silence in a lie, not even the imposter MK Oren Hazan. So much for the first contention. The second is even more fallacious – there’s no other way to reveal the truth but the one adopted by the organization. ...

Breaking the Silence’s thousand witnesses are the army’s elite commando unit, the most excellent of soldiers, the most daring, most patriotic of them. Their day of glory will come. They are much braver than the cowards who shoot to death girls wielding scissors. They are the only ones who can still save the IDF’s lost honor in the world. If Israeli public diplomacy is still effective anywhere in the world, it’s thanks to Breaking the Silence. If there’s still a chance to talk to people of conscience in the world, it’s thanks to the “snitches.” ...

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About Me

A Princeton PhD, was a US diplomat for over 20 years, mostly in Eastern Europe, and was promoted to the Senior Foreign Service in 1997. For the Open World Leadership Center, he speaks with
its delegates from Europe/Eurasia on the topic, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United" (http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2017/03/notes-and-references-for-discussion-e.html). Affiliated with Georgetown University (http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/jhb7/) for over ten years, he still shares ideas with students about public diplomacy.
The papers of his deceased father -- poet and diplomat John L. Brown -- are stored at Georgetown University Special Collections at the Lauinger Library. They are manuscript materials valuable to scholars interested in post-WWII U.S.-European cultural relations.
This blog is dedicated to him, Dr. John L. Brown, a remarkable linguist/humanist who wrote in the Foreign Service Journal (1964) -- years before "soft power" was ever coined -- that "The CAO [Cultural Affairs Officer] soon comes to realize that his job is really a form of love-making and that making love is never really successful unless both partners are participating."